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It Happened in New York

“Slavery was not a side-show in American History. It was the main event.” So says James Oliver Horton, history professor at George Washington University.

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Do Not Cross The Color Line

At the awkward gathering of New York area students who had been accepted to Princeton, the father of another black student approached me as I poured myself a glass of ginger ale. “You know, we have to stick together,” he … Read More

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Reminiscences of Tacky Rubbish

I drove by Red Robin the other day. It sits on the corner of La Cumbre Plaza. About everything else in the mall has changed in the ten years since I last set foot in Red Robin, filling up with … Read More

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Riding with the Boss

The thirtieth anniversary edition of Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run came out a few months back. For better or worse, we have all chosen to spend four years in Springsteen country, and truth be told, he’s kind of hard to avoid

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Two Poems

BOX You’d handed me the thing because I’d asked to read your letters, made in Romania— not that you’d been there yourself, but from an aunt, you spoke, half-crazy. And because it was a puzzle, you said: Open it. You … Read More

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Read Slowly and See

In 1968 John Sinclair of the band DC5 wrote that “rock and roll music is a weapon of cultural revolution.” But this overtly political attitude – emblematic of 1960’s music, or at least of the retelling of the story of … Read More

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On the Recovery of Ancient Literature

Sometime in an Oxford Greek class in 1895, a professor got off on a tangent about the vast repositories of long-lost ancient texts that might be lying preserved in the hot sands of Upper Egypt….The following year, Egyptian authorities converted what remained of the mineral-rich dirt to fertilizer.

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Circumstances of my Death, Preferred

1. Bad gumbo. 2. While walking down an alley, Upper East Side, film-noir/cartoon-splat!: a pea-green piano falling from a fourth-floor window or thereabouts. 3. Falling from a fourth-floor window or thereabouts. 4. Eighty years old, at home, with friends, conversation … Read More

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Ted Hughes is Dead

I. Ted Hughes has died and gone to Hell. Most of the time he died as a human, Almost every time with his eyes open. The first time he died, he was a woman crawling on hands and knees, through … Read More

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Recovery

On Allie’s fourteenth birthday, Christopher felt his hard-won sanity begin its retreat—right there at the kitchen table. It started as he watched Allie, his step-daughter, try to tell Cyndi, her mother, stories about their day at Christopher’s parents’ ranch: the … Read More

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Old Europe, Astral America

“France is just a country. America is a concept.”
-Jean Baudrillard

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The Car Tree Game

There’s a man claiming to have seen a giant squid. He says it came up close to the edge of the bay, swimming in T-waves, and shaking a little bit. He says it probably would have eaten him alive, but that he got away just in time.

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